


Holy Names

by torches



Series: Second Chances/Guilt is a Useless Emotion [2]
Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-09-10
Updated: 2004-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-10 23:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/105637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/torches/pseuds/torches





	Holy Names

Asuka reached down and cupped her hands together, drawing up some of the orange liquid. She stared at her reflection in it, then splashed herself with it. Her nose wrinkled. "It still smells like blood," she said.

Shinji lay next to her, staring at her, memorizing her every movement. "I'm not surprised," he said. "It is blood, in some strange way."

"Disgusting," Asuka said. "We sat in blood for hours at a stretch, and they never told us."

"Look at it this way," Shinji said. "Would you have sat in LCL for two whole hours straight during the sync tests if you had known we were swimming in the blood of the mother of humanity?"

"Of course not! That would be revolting!" Asuka let the LCL drip off her hands, watching every drop.

"Exactly," Shinji said. "We'd never have done it if we knew."

They had similar conversations all day. This was their way of avoiding talking.

\--

Asuka stared out at the red sea, Shinji standing by her side. Her brown eyes focused on the decomposed white hand reaching aimlessly towards the sky. Red sea, red sky. Red thoughts echoed through her mind –

_"You'd do this for her, but not for me? I'm not important enough for you to save . . ."_

_"Momma! They made me an elite pilot! I'm supposed to keep it a secret, so I'll only tell you, Momma!"_

_"Sync ratio zero . . . I can't be the Second Children anymore."_

_"My Unit 02 is the first real Evangelion!"_

_"You were protecting me all along!"_

_"I am not a doll."_

– She touched her bandages, running her fingers across the rough fabric. "Am I his doll?" she whispered. She glanced over at Shinji. He was staring out over the sea, eyes troubled. Asuka stared down at her chest. "He . . . needed me? Why?"

Shinji looked over at Asuka. She's been broken, he thought. Zeruel pushed her to the edge, and those white Evas shoved her off it. Her mother . . . Eva-02 . . . they killed her so suddenly, just after Asuka had discovered she was still alive. _Would I have been the same, if it had been Eva-01?_ Shinji turned back to the sea. _Her mother was not as strong as mine_, he thought. _The people who built Eva-02 were more cunning. It took more strength to break the barriers between mother and daughter than it did mother and son. If I could have given her more time with her mother . . . if I had known how . . . I should have done it. I was selfish._ "Asuka," he said. She didn't respond, lost in her own thoughts. "Asuka," he said, louder. She blinked, then looked at him with that eye. For a moment, Shinji saw her, dead, sprawled across ground stained red like blood, maggots eating out her eyes. "Are you hungry?" he said. She stopped and stared off into space.

"Yes," Asuka said, sounding rather surprised. "I am."

Shinji nodded. "Then we should start moving. It might be a few hours before we can find any food." He looked out over the expanse of the crater. "Over that ridge over there," and he pointed to where they had woken up earlier in the day, "all there is is wasteland. We won't look over there." He turned to look in another direction. "We have maybe a twenty-mile walk or more to get to the other side of the crater, I think. Third Impact decimated Tokyo-3. The only chance we have of eating today is to hope the suburbs didn't get wrecked too badly."

Asuka stood up. "Stupid Shinji," she said. "You never could pilot Unit 01 right."

"Not everyone was the Infallible Asuka," Shinji said. "We didn't all spend our whole lives training in Eva."

Asuka walked up to stand next to him. "Not everyone was the Invincible Shinji, either," she said. "We didn't all have that miraculous sync ratio to fall back on when our skills failed us." Her words were coated with bitterness.

Shinji flushed, looking away. "It's not my fault," he said. "She loved me."

Asuka reddened. Her ego burst like a half-full balloon, already popped and barely fit to call a balloon. "I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know."

"You were in the hospital," Shinji said. "It was Zeruel. I saw your Eva chopped to pieces. And Rei . . . Rei used that N2 mine. I couldn't bear it. I went back to . . . well, I suppose I thought I was going back to save the world from Third Impact, but really I wanted to get revenge after what he did to you." He paused, remembering. "I was winning, too. I could have beaten him. But I ran out of internal power." Shinji stared off at the faraway edge of the crater, the memory coming back to him in vivid color –

_"Move! Move! Move! Move! We have to stop the Angel! Move! Move! I have to save my friends!"_

_"I'm just so tired of it all . . ."_

_"Mother?"_

– Shinji smiled. "It was . . . exhilarating. I know exactly how you felt fighting those Evas. I experienced it. To feel your mother, the first person you recognize, your first love, by your side – no, inside you, breathing when you breathe – for a brief moment, I experienced Heaven. I came back to that memory, again and again. That was what I wanted." Shinji looked over at Asuka. She was barely paying any attention to him. Shinji's face fell.

"Did you get what you wanted?" Asuka said. "Sure doesn't look like you did."

Shinji looked up. "No," he said. "I got what I wanted. I didn't like it."

Asuka looked at him in surprise. She turned away just as quickly. "Too bad," she said. Her voice was flat, like a bad recording of someone speaking.

Shinji shrugged. "It's nothing new," he said. He looked out at the crater's edge. "Come on. We'd better start heading for the other side if we want to eat anytime soon." He started walking, Asuka following a few moments later. He tried not to think too hard about that –

_"We'll need a leader, then. And since I'm the smartest person here, the leader will obviously be me!"_

– but he couldn't stop thinking about her. Shinji closed his eyes, sighing, and wished to have the old Asuka back, if only in some small way.

-Who's There?-

They walked in silence, passing by upturned cars, blackened rubble, and the eerie grinning Evangelion corpses. The red LCL sea rhythmically lapped at the shore. Since most of the crater was full of LCL, they were taking the long way around. This gave them the advantage of being able to look to see if anything could be salvaged in the areas surrounding the crater left behind from Third Impact. They found a wrecked electronics store, with radios, CD players, and televisions. As they expected, none of them worked this close to ground zero. Asuka grabbed a CD player, just in case. Shinji was stuck carrying it in his pocket. Every so often, he would stick his hands in his pockets, accidentally brush against the hard plastic case, and take his hands out. It felt like his SDAT.

"What happened to all the water?" Asuka said, startling Shinji.

"What?" he said.

"I said, what happened to all the water?"

Shinji stopped walking, exhaled, and looked at the sea. "I think Impact evaporated all the water for . . . a long way around. The only water we might find is melted ice. Or maybe, if we're lucky, a warehouse full of bottled water. But that's not likely. We'll just have to get what liquid we can however we can." He looked at the sea.

Asuka said it first. "We might have to drink LCL," she said. Her shoulders fell. "We might have to swallow the souls of the rest of humanity to survive."

"We'll do what we have to," Shinji said. "No more."

"Always worked for you in the past, hasn't it?" Asuka said. Shinji flinched, but there was no venom in the words, just a statement of fact. "Position the target in the center, pull the switch."

"You weren't in Tokyo-3 then," Shinji said. "How did you . . . ?"

"I don't know," Asuka said. "It just sounded right. Like I said, my memory's fucked up."

"I'm sorry," Shinji said.

"You can't fix it," Asuka said. "So let me worry myself to death over it." She sighed. "Wait. No, I forgot you always worry about everything." She stared at him. Shinji stared back at her, pinned by those brown eyes. Asuka closed her eyes, folded her arms across her chest, and leaned her head back, letting out another long sigh. "Well, unless you're Jesus Christ, I don't think you can fix me. So don't act like him and try to shoulder the blame for every single thing that goes wrong." Shinji stared at Asuka. She blinked. "What?" she said.

"What if," Shinji said, "maybe I am the Second Coming? Or something like it?"

Asuka's mouth fell open. She didn't say anything. All she did was stare at him. After a while, Shinji started to fidget under her stare.

"What?" he said.

"Jesus Christ," Asuka said. "That explains a few things." Asuka's mind reeled. Your father is your model for God, she thought. That makes too much sense for it to be coincidence.

Shinji looked away –

_"I think I hate my father."_

_"I think we were destined to meet, Ikari Shinji."_

_"Sometimes it requires a level of trust akin to a leap of faith, but I believe in him."_

– Asuka's stare dug too deep. "I'm no messiah," Shinji said.

"Christ at the Second Coming isn't a messiah, either." Asuka said. "He's a sword-wielding lunatic."

Shinji gestured around him. "Look around, Asuka. Does it look like the Second Coming is ever going to come to a world like this?"

Asuka bit her lip. "No." She rubbed the gauze on her right arm. "Maybe we've got it all wrong. Maybe you're the Antichrist."

Shinji shivered. "Fuck," he said. "Wouldn't that just be the perfect end to all this?" He clenched and unclenched his right hand in a fist. "It makes too much fucking sense," he said, collapsing to the ground. "Goddammit."

_If he's the Antichrist_, Asuka thought, _then what am I?_ She reached up and touched the bandage over her left eye. Her hand fell to her side. "False," she said. She sat down on the ground and stared at nothing.

"The opposite of truth," Shinji said. _Me._


End file.
